OpenBSD on Pinebook 1080p?

[rogerroger]

You don't need to use serial port:
1. get miniroot.fs: https://cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/arm64/
2. write image to SD card: dd if=miniroot66.fs of=/dev/rsdXc bs=1m
3. write SPL: dd if=/usr/local/share/u-boot/pinebook/u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=/dev/sdXc bs=1024 seek=8
(you have to install aarch64 flavor of u-boot port)
4. when boot prompt is shown, type:
boot> set tty fb0
(this will get you working display - you will have to enter it at each boot as long as it's not in boot.conf)
5. proceed with standard installation

Thanks for these instructions! They were very helpful. The first part is documented in INSTALL.arm64, though it's not very obvious, and the `set tty fb0` part is totally absent since those instructions only really cover single-board computers that they're expecting you to talk to over a serial console, so this helped me get along. And for the record I should say that I have a Pinebook, not a Pinebook Pro, but the instructions seem compatible so far; OpenBSD is really good about having either no support or perfect support for devices after all.

However, I did follow your step 5 and proceeded with the standard installation, installing onto the eMMC (sd1 to OpenBSD) twice, and got nowhere. After finishing the install and rebooting I just get a blank screen.

However cloning my miniroot66.fs-based SD card (sd0) onto the eMMC (sd1) boots successfully:

Code:

Welcome to the OpenBSD/arm64 6.6 installation program
(I)nstall, (U)pgrade, (A)utoinstall, or (S)hell? s
# (cd /dev && sh MAKEDEV sd0)
# (cd /dev && sh MAKEDEV sd1)
# time dd if=/dev/rsd0c of=/dev/rsd1c bs=1m
3781+1 records in
3781+1 records out
3965190144 bytes transferred in 991.097 secs (4000806 bytes/sec)
 16m31.15s real    0m00.00s user    0m14.68s system
# reboot # and take out the SD card

so I don't know what's wrong with the actual install script. Maybe I did something wrong?

The install script (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openbs...install.md) should be doing:

Code:

# simplified assuming plat=pine64

mount_msdos -l sd1i /mnt/boot
mkdir -p /mnt/boot/efi/boot
cp /mnt/usr/mdec/BOOTAA64.EFI /mnt/boot/efi/boot/bootaa64.efi
echo bootaa64.efi > /mnt/mnt/efi/boot/startup.nsh

dd if=/usr/mdec/pine64/u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=sd1c bs=1024 seek=8

which is equivalent to what I did, afaict, to get the SD card booting, since miniroot66.fs contains bootaa64.efi already and then I manually did that `dd` line, so I don't know what the difference is.

Any clues you can share?

Maybe I'll try a third install attempt. Maybe it will go better.